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Woolly minded hippies?

Forget Southwold. This year’s Climate Camp protest against a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent is where Gordon Brown ought to be spending his summer holiday.

I went to the Climate Camp in the spirit of curiosity and nostalgia, having been taken to the protest camp at Greenham Common missile base as a child in the early eighties. I had intended to go to the camp on Monday with a borrowed tent but was put off by the rain. On Tuesday it also rained. By Wednesday it had stopped raining but it seemed far too much effort to carry a tent and a sleeping bag via public transport to Kingsnorth – I sensed I would be persona non grata if I turned up in my car – so I put on my rarely-worn wellies and just went for the day.

Although I am interested in green politics, as you may discern I am not a die-hard environmental campaigner. I am also suspicious of anything which smacks of woolly-minded hippydom. However, when I got to Strood, where a Climate Camp bus run on recycled vegetable oil was ferrying people between the railway station and the camp, I was pleasantly surprised to find my fellow passengers were not the grubby crusties I had feared. They included a sporty-looking guy who worked for the local council, a student from Bristol University and a smart, urbane photographer also down from London for the day.

We were warned on the bus that we would be searched by the police before entering the camp, and that they would ask for our details but we were not obliged to give them. From a distance the camp, which is on a hill overlooking the existing power station, looked like a mediaeval circus. We were dropped off at the top of a lane leading to the camp which was lined with an extraordinary number of police officers, some of whom had been drafted in from forces from afar as Wales and Yorkshire.

I was alarmed when the female police officer assigned to search me put on a pair of purple surgical gloves but she merely gave me a quick frisk and checked my bag to make sure it contained no weapons or drugs. A “full internal examination” wasn’t necessary, I was told. After refusing to give any details apart from the facts that I am 5ft 6 and white, I was given a pink slip to prove I had been searched and allowed to enter the camp.

Inside, there was a fair scattering of feral looking types and white people with dreadlocks, and overall the campers struck the barefoot, deliberately casual attitudes of seasoned environmental campaigners that I had expected. But, what offset the hippyish vibe and what impressed me most was the serious-minded efficiency of the camp.

As well as eleven large tents for each ‘neighbourhood’ of campaigners from around the country, where three communal meals were produced each day for the 200 or so people in each neighbourhood, there was a group of marquees in the middle where a large number of lectures and workshops about climate change issues were being held each day of the week-long camp. There was a media tent with laptops and internet access, an independent TV station, a cinema screen, showers, sinks and numerous compost toilets housed in temporary wooden huts. Electricity was provided by solar panels, wind turbines and people riding fixed bicyles. A mains water supply had been bought from Southern Water. In short, a fully functioning eco-village for more than a thousand people had been constructed from scratch in three days. All of this had been organised along non-hierarchical lines, with no central committee and people taking responsibility for tasks according to their expertise and inclination.

The level of debate and knowledge in the workshops was impressive too. I went to a talk about Tradable Energy Quotas, a scheme devised by academics in which all citizens are given a quota of energy and large energy users can buy extra energy from those who use less energy. Apparently DEFRA are currently conducting their own feasibility study into this idea. In another tent Dr David Fleming, a writer and academic, gave an inspirational lecture about how environmentally conscious enterprises should be developed in the outside world along the ‘inside out’, non-‘top down’ anarchist lines used to organise the Climate Camp itself. If more people came to this free camp to learn about practical ways of saving the planet rather than wasting money and frying their minds at the numerous corporate festivals that have sprung up, Britain would be a better place.

There were a few downsides. I was told that some of the locals who work at the existing Kingsnorth power station are against the protesters, since they fear their livelihoods will be at risk if the proposals for a new power station are stopped. Landlords in the local pubs won’t serve the protesters as a gesture of solidarity with the workers.

During another workshop when I pointed out some of the impracticalities of alleviating climate change through vegan farming, I had the definite sense that I had upset the workshop’s somewhat complacent groupthink.

However, the overwhelming impression of the camp was of energy, community spirit and open-mindedness and everybody I met was polite and welcoming. On the way back from the camp, as a storm was beginning to roll overhead, I was given a lift back to the station by a band that had played there the night before.

We stopped and stood on top of their van watching lightning fork through the violet sky. The power station, the camp and the police swarming around it was suddenly lit by natural electricity. The level of police presence seemed ludicrous as the camp felt incredibly peaceful, although this might change on Saturday when a mass action to shut down the existing power station is planned. Gordon Brown ought to be tapping into the intelligent and, in the main, practical ideas of these protesters. As was said in one of the workshops, a large problem like global warming does not necessarily need to be dealt with by a large solution; we can begin to tackle it with small solutions inside a large framework. The government is missing a trick by not engaging seriously with the Climate Camp.